The Perils of Calling Trump a Liar

When Richard Nixon was president, most journalists knew he was a thoroughly dishonest man. Early in his first term he had declared war on them—famously in two high-profile speeches delivered by his pit-bull vice president, Spiro T. Agnew—and he spied on many with illegal wiretaps authorized by his national security adviser Henry Kissinger. When reporters crossed him, he punished them with petty retributions (excluding some from his trip to China) and unconstitutional abuses of power (siccing the IRS or FBI on others) that became grounds for his impeachment.

Well before Watergate, Nixon’s treatment of reporters led them to thunder that because of his distortions and manipulations, freedom of the press was under siege. The news media’s leading lights sounded the alarm. Accepting the “Broadcaster of the Year” award in 1971, Walter Cronkite labeled Nixon’s anti-press campaign “a grand conspiracy.” On the Dick Cavett show, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee charged that “the First Amendment is in greater danger than any time I’ve seen it.” A blue-ribbon National Press Club report found Nixon guilty of “an unprecedented, government-wide effort to control, restrict and conceal information” and “discredit the press.” The Senate even convened hearings—chaired by Sam Ervin, Democrat of North Carolina, who later led the Watergate inquiry—into whether, as Ervin put it, “the Constitution’s guarantee of a free press” was “on its deathbed.”

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Notably, though, it wasn’t until the Watergate investigations proved that Nixon had deliberately uttered his falsehoods with the intent to deceive the public that journalists rolled out the heaviest rhetorical artillery available to them: Calling the president a liar.

Several reasons accounted for this circumspection. A lie isn’t simply any old falsehood; it’s told with the knowledge that it’s false and with the intent to deceive. In most cases, journalists couldn’t prove that Nixon was knowingly misleading them, and as workaday reporters they didn’t want to seem biased—especially with the administration officials and surrogates clamoring about their alleged liberal bias in order to discredit them. Then, too, there was a certain respect for the office of the presidency. “When it’s Richard Nixon,” explained Clark Mollenhoff of the Des Moines Register, who had worked briefly in the Nixon White House, “you restrain yourself and do not call him a liar.”

Over time, however, the daily contradictions between what Nixon said and what journalists were discovering grew stark. The discrepancies, noted Bradlee and his Post colleague Howard Simons, “forced the reader and the listener to choose between the White House and the press.” By the end, even Nixon defenders in the press were using the l-word. “He lied to the people. … He lied to his lawyers. He lied to the press,” sighed the conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick the day after Nixon resigned, in August 1974. “My president is a liar.” Eventually even the most diehard Nixon loyalists agreed. “Lies,” noted Chuck Colson, Nixon’s chief thug, “brought Nixon down.”

The barrage of false, duplicitous, dishonest and misleading statements emanating from Donald Trump and the White House in the last week has again raised the question of whether and when it’s OK for a mainstream news organization—one that aspires to objectivity and non-partisanship in its news coverage—to say flatly that the president is lying. This is far from a new challenge with Trump; his cavalier disregard for the truth was an abiding preoccupation of journalists throughout the campaign. Scores of news outlets, including this one, devoted op-ed columns, media criticism, fact-checking features and listicles to cataloguing and debunking Trump’s fire-hose spray of false statements.

But what was mildly controversial during the campaign has become considerably more fraught now that Trump is president. After his press secretary’s brazenly false assertions last week about turnout at the inauguration and Trump’s own repetition of the spurious claim that millions of Americans voted illegally in the election, journalists have begun to wonder—quite legitimately—whether the next four years are going feed them not just a steady diet of the usual White House spin but an exceptionally toxic brew of misinformation, propaganda, bullshit and lies. And it’s not entirely clear how to respond.

Some want the objective press to repeatedly call out Trump for lying—using the word whenever possible. As they see it, such imprecations could inform the public about the president’s incessant mendacity or at least provide a morally clear and refreshingly blunt description of his modus operandi. Many news editors, however, fear that using the l-word will mean overreaching and speculating about Trump’s intent. Besides, it will be sure to give rise to charges of bias, name-calling and unprofessionalism. On this one, these editors are right. Though it may seem fainthearted to use word like “falsehood” and “untruth,” in the long run the press will have more influence if it avoids insinuating more than it can confidently assert to be true.

Underneath debates like this are always questions about the place of objectivity in American journalism. For roughly a century, the most important and prestigious news outlets have aspired to present the news without partisan coloration. To Americans today, such a posture is so familiar that it’s hard to imagine things otherwise. But in the 19th century, newspapers were frankly partisan, sometimes literally party organs, other times just shamelessly one-sided in how they reported the news. In historian Michael McGerr’s book The Decline of Popular Politics, he recounts how two New Haven newspapers, one Democratic, one Republican, reported a political convention wholly differently, so that a reader could be forgiven for thinking he was learning about two altogether different events. Like Fox News and MSNBC today, newspapers proudly slanted the news to suit the politics of their audiences.

But by the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an ideal of objectivity was emerging. For a news outlet to adopt this ideal doesn’t mean its reporting was invariably free of value judgment or even bias; objectivity was and is an aspiration—a set of rules to ensure that the news conveyed could be trusted by readers of any political orientation. As the British statesman and historian Lord Acton declared back then, defending an identical principle in the writing of history, “Our [account of] Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike; that nobody can tell, without examining the list of authors, where the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and whether Fairbairn or Grasquet, Liebermann or Harrison took it up.”

Historians debate the reasons for objectivity’s emergence in journalism. Some emphasize economic motives, the desire to reach a wider readership. Others argue that the idea of objectivity was linked to a growing awareness of subjectivity—that the difficulty journalists faced in pinning down clear-cut factsled them to adopt regular practices that could assure readers of their credibility. Still others point to a new political ethos of the Progressive Era that encouraged citizens to think for themselves and not take cues from corrupt party leaders.

The embrace of the objective news model didn’t happen all at once. But a critical moment was undoubtedly Adolph Ochs’s purchase of the New York Times in 1896, when the new publisher resolved, in his famous credo, “to give the news impartially, without fear or favor, regardless of party, sect, or interests involved.” Over the next decades, news organizations championed objectivity, and with the development of radio and TV, network news followed suit. Not only revenue but—more important—credibility, prestige and influence flowed from being seen as a reliable source to all consumers, no matter their ideology.

It wasn’t long, however, before pitfalls became evident. No master text set down the tenets of objectivity and how to adhere to it. Journalists had to find their way. Some interpreted the idea as an adherence to factuality, seeking to strip out the writer’s personal voice. For others, the key was nonpartisanship—presenting the news so as not to favor one party or the other. Others emphasized the disavowal of advocacy. Most journalists probably operated—and still operate—with all these interrelated principles at play to some degree.

It was easy to lose sight of the fact that objectivity, in the phrase of historian Thomas Haskell, is not neutrality. In the 1930s and 1940s, the poet and playwright Archibald MacLeish was one of many who saw journalistic objectivity bleeding into a potentially misleading neutralism. “It is current-day fancy to consider a journalist objective if he hands out slaps and compliments with evenhanded impartiality on both sides of the question,” MacLeish said. “Such an idea is, of course, infantile. Objectivity consists in keeping your eye on the object [and] describing the object as it is.” In the 1950s, journalists agonized over the ways that Sen. Joseph McCarthy manipulated them—leveling baseless charges that various public figures were Communists, forcing journalists to report the allegations if only to later refute them. “Our rigid formulae of so-called objectivity,” said Eric Sevareid of CBS, “have given the lie the same prominence and impact that truth is given; they have elevated the influence of fools to that of wise men; the ignorant to the level of the learned; the evil to the level of the good.” The problem of “false balance” that everyone rails about today is nothing new. Journalists have known about it and struggled with it for decades.

The great crisis of objectivity came in the 1960s and early 1970s, when presidential deception and the questioning spirit of the times led journalists to doubt the wisdom of their now-longstanding ideal. Although objectivity ultimately retained its central place as a lodestar, the practice of journalism, even in mainstream news outlets, changed. It became more adversarial, more interpretive, more contextual, more personal and even more opinionated. The spin and deceptions of subsequent presidents coaxed journalists even more from their traditional stance of bloodless neutrality. Under George W. Bush in particular, the administration’s false claims about global warming, birth control and the case for the Iraq War (among other policy issues)—along with the flourishing of journalism on the internet, where the old journalism-school rules weren’t as widely followed—brought about the use of sharper language in taking on the president, including a spate of books denouncing Bush’s “lies.”

Today, anyone who works for a news outlet that aspires primarily to report the news in a way that will be trusted by all audiences faces a dilemma: to avoid the misleading resort to false balance, which can give the lie the same prominence as the truth, while at the same time adhering enough to the time-tested conventions of non-partisan journalism so that readers and viewers will turn to you and trust you when they want to know what happened in the world.

And so we circle back to how we should describe Trump’s gushers of falsehoods. It’s easy to understand why people cheer on the frequent and intensifying use of the word “lie”: It seems honest, direct, with no punches pulled. It’s the opposite to the kind of false-balance journalism that MacLeish decried decades ago, which presents truth and error as two equal sides of an issue.

But rejecting false balance doesn’t actually require using the word “lie.” It’s entirely possible to point out, in plain and direct language, that Trump (or one of his proxies) is not telling the truth when he makes his claims about crowd size—or about any of a hundred other things—without using a word that implies you know what he was thinking when he did so. If Trump says, as he did during one of the fall debates, that he never called global warming a Chinese hoax, and there’s a tweet from him to the contrary, the word “lie” may be warranted. But if he asserts that millions of people voted illegally, we can’t say for sure that he knows this is nonsense. He may be deluded or ignorant or just saying whatever he wants to be true at the moment—which seems to many people to be how Trump really functions.

This is more than a semantic issue. News organizations that purport to report the news—and not just to traffic in opinion—have to write their articles in a way that sustains the faith of all their readers. The New York Times and the Associated Press, Time and Newsweek, CBS and ABC—these have always been sources you could turn to in order to learn the facts of what’s happening in the world, even in times of polarization, even when they’re being unfairly tarred as liberally biased. Maintaining that credibility means not overreaching, not implying a knowledge of a politician’s intent that you don’t have. And it is just as easy to set the record straight to say in a headline that the president’s claim was “false,” “untrue” or “wrong.”

Using the word “lie” promiscuously may, in the short term, score a point against a president who has shown a contempt for the facts. But over the long-term, the authority and credibility of aspirationally objective mainstream news organizations like the New York Times are best served by scrupulously trying to report the news in ways that can be trusted by readers of any political viewpoint. And it’s by upholding and reinforcing that authority and credibility that the Fourth Estate will best guide readers to the truth amid the misinformation, propaganda and lies produced by the administration of Donald J. Trump.